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Porteco Lighting

Submitted by Kelly O'Brien
on Tue, 06/17/2014 - 10:01

With all the updates to this site and other sites we work on, I forget to update here about our activities. Back in late December/early January, we completed a major upgrade to the Porteco Lighting website. It turned out to be a very enjoyable undertaking (no really!), so I will outline what we did.

1. We switched the site from a static site to a fully dynamic site using Wordpress as the foundation. This allows the people at Porteco to update the content whenever they want. This even includes the slideshow on the homepage. I know Yolonda Morgan, the owner of Porteco Lighting, loves to be able to add content and keep her customers up-to-date on the goings on around her store, so this was a very important change to the site. Something I need to learn to do more!

2. Along with switching to Wordpress, it was necessary to develop a custom Wordpress template for the site. So that's what we did from the ground up. This allowed us to get exactly the functionality that Porteco needed out of their site, not a lot of extras they will never use. This made for a very streamlined template. Also, since we did the coding, we can easily go back into the code and make changes should Porteco Lighting need other functions added later.

3. Porteco Lighting also has an online store, so we needed to integrate the store with the main site. Not usually the easier of the challenges. But making the user experience flow seamlessly from main site to shopping cart and back is essential. Plus, for some reason, I personally had fun dressing up how the items displayed in the search results (I'm a geek...).

4. Color, dang it. Much of the lighting Porteco sells are sculptures in and of themselves. The site should reflect this. The background is a stylized version of glass that comes on some of the fixtures. It worked well to give the site a little spice. The previous site was mostly gray.

Those are the main points to the redesign. Like I said, this was a fun project to work on - so much color and imagery to work with. We have more projects in store with Porteco in the future as well, like more "How-To" videos. Meanwhile, check out the website, and take a look at the video we already did with Porteco Lighting, "How to Attach a Low-Voltage Jack". Cheers!